Walkify

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Finding a match
Found a match, current trip

Inspiration

Countless times we’ve heard our closest friends ask us to walk home with them at night for safety reasons. Oftentimes, they are young women who have read horror stories online about the dangers of walking home alone at night. We believe that our friends should not live in a world where that is a concern.

What it does

Imagine studying late at night at Fondy and your home is 20 minutes away at Latitude. Simply search for a buddy on Walkify, and you’ll be able to walk home safely and without worry.

Walkify simply matches two women who share similar start locations and end destinations to be walking buddies. In order to sign up, you must register with a rice email and a profile picture for the Walkify team to verify your identity. Once verified, you are free to find buddies to walk home with.

How we built it

Walkify was created using React, Supabase, and careful planning. Before engineering, we spent time as a team to map out our features and user experiences in a Miro whiteboard. Once our roadmap was set, we divided and conquered. React’s powerful full stack capabilities combined with Supabase’s simple-to-use database features allowed us to create a lightweight web application with a great user experience and true impact.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we faced was working with the Google Maps API. This was largely because the API did not serve all the needs we were looking for, as well as did not have as much community support via forums as we had hoped. In the end, we were able to figure out workarounds by leveraging creative solutions with other APIs and libraries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Before coming into HackRice12, most of our team had never coded a single line of code in React. However, after 36 hours of Hacking, our team has learned a lot about React, full stack development, and web technologies.

On top of learning new technologies, we’re extremely proud to make a product that we truly believe in. We believe that Walkify can help make the world a better and safer place.

What we learned

While learning React was the biggest hurdle, we learned so much more along the way. From user authentication to straightforward and lightweight database management, we learned how to use powerful tools to make an amazing web application.

What's next for Walkify

Walkify has a lot of room for improvement. While we believe it provides a great demonstration for how women’s safety around college campuses can be revolutionized, we also believe that a more sophisticated user authentication system and in-app chatting with your buddy are two features, just to name a few, that could greatly improve Walkify.